With the early history of Quakerism we have little to do. Its founder, George Fox, was the son of a weaver at Fenny Drayton (or Drayton in the Clay) in Leicestershire. He had been piously brought up by his parents, who were members of the Church of England, and passed a boyhood and youth of singular purity and innocence. When he was growing up to manhood he passed through a period of deep religious depression, and found no help from any of his friends or from the ministers of the parish churches in his neighborhood (who at this time were mainly Presbyterians) or from the newer lights of the rising separatist bodies. One counselled him to have blood let, another to use tobacco and sing psalms; and the poor distracted boy, whose soul was heavy with a sense of the wrath of God, found no comfort from any of them. A careful study of the Bible made him quick to see the weak points in the systems that surrounded him, and at last he found the comfort he sought in the sense of an immediate communion with God and an indwelling of the Spirit of Christ within the soul. For a time he led a solitary life, leaving home and friends and wandering over the country on foot, clothed in garments of leather, sleeping wherever he could find a lodging, and spending whole days sometimes in the hollows of great trees. Soon it was “borne in upon him” that the presence of the Spirit and the inner light was as good a qualification for the office of preacher as that of being a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge, and he began his public ministry about the year 1646.[2] With the externals of Quakerism we are all familiar: the morbid conscientiousness that forbade the use of the common forms of courtesy, the simple dress, the refusal to submit to the authority of magistrates or of priests in matters concerning religion, and the unwillingness to pay them the usual compliments due to their position. The true inner nature of Quakerism, which gave it its strength, lay not merely in its abhorrence of forms and formulas, its vigorous protest against any compulsion in matters either of religious thought or religious observance, but essentially in its consciousness of the need of the Divine presence and its belief in the fulfilment of the Saviour’s promise to send his Spirit into the world.